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This chapter considers the role of ‘memory politics’ – understood as the combination of official and unofficial attempts to deal with the legacy of past violations – in the struggle for democratization in Central America: official initiatives can include truth commissions, amnesty dispensations, criminal investigations and prosecutions, and a range of institutional reforms aimed at redressing the previous failure of the state to guarantee human rights; unofficial initiatives developed by civil society actors to confront the past can include investigations of violations, legal actions, and different kinds of commemorative acts and exercises in collective memory. Memory politics operates at multiple levels and involves a diversity of agents, including local communities, national and international non-governmental human rights organizations (HROs), governments, the media, and, in the case of Central America, the UN; however, it is suggested here that its long-term effects in any national context depend on the interaction between official and unofficial efforts to address the legacies of the past. The experiences of memory politics analysed in this chapter are those of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the three Central American countries that during the 1990s undertook official processes of investigating past violations of human rights. The precise nature of memory politics and the impact it has had varied considerably in these three countries, and it is suggested that four interrelated factors are central to explaining differences between the respective national experiences: the first is the specific political and social legacies of human rights abuse in each country; the second concerns the circumstances of the transition from war to peace, specifically the prevailing balance of forces and the trade-off between truth and justice that this engendered in each case; the third is the role of local HROs and civil society in general in the politics of memory; and the fourth is the role of international governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in efforts to uncover the truth about the past and to address the consequences of violations. The first three sections of the chapter compare the legacies of human rights abuses, the transitional trade-offs between truth and justice, and the role of civil society organizations and international actors in the memory politics of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala; the final section considers the impact of memory politics on the prospects for democracy in these countries.

At the Escuela Agricola Panamericana in Zamorano, Honduras, Carr confirmed many times that local people had valuable stories to tell about their lives and nature. Even their myths contained interesting bits of knowledge and perspective. Yet, Carr believed that well-meaning US bureaucrats consistently underestimated the Central Americans and discounted their claims. It would be fair to say that most scientists, particularly northern scientists, found little or nothing of value in the stories of Latin American peasants. Because he spoke Spanish fluently, Carr had access to information that few North American scientists could capture. Appreciation of local people and their stories served Carr for the rest of his long career, especially as he began the detailed investigation of sea turtles. His conservation programs also acknowledged and incorporated the interests and needs of local culture. Like his students in Florida, many of his students at the Escuela Agricola Panamericana never forgot him.

This chapter steps back and asks the question of whether the dilemmas that families face, as great as they are, continue to be relevant in the context of other crises from epidemics to natural disasters to the long-term aftermath of wars. It examines what matters and what does not in times of crisis and afterward, beginning with families in Botswana, where the AIDS pandemic has led to a reduction in life expectancy. The chapter next examines the lives of families in Honduras, after massive mudslides displaced more than a million people. It also describes families in Vietnam a quarter-century after a war that led to several million deaths. Even in the midst of these tragedies and their aftermaths, there are glimpses of hope—programs that are truly making a difference in the lives of children. The chapter ends by describing these programs and the chance they provide for profound change.

This book aims to provide an understanding of the transnational dynamics of Central America. This is a region that includes Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. These countries share a close geographical relationship and historical background, a geopolitical interdependence, and challenges in the international arena. In tracing the transnational dynamics of Central America, the book analyzes the connected history, close and dynamic interrelations, crossings and mutual impact of the countries of the isthmus on one another, in addition to their geopolitical interdependence and a series of common challenges they have faced in the international arena. This book is an attempt to make sense of these and other regional trends by indicating that one needs to approach Central America with a Janus-faced perspective: trying to understand the process of fragmentation into separate nation-states along with lingering transnational dynamics.

This chapter analyses key hypotheses on the impacts of rural population growth on agriculture, natural resource management, and related impacts on poverty in development countries. It is argued that the impacts of population growth likely to be negative when there is no collective response than when population growth induces infrastructure development, collective action, institutional or organisational development. The results of recent studies by the International Food Policy Research Institute in Honduras are discussed.

Where did the transnational gangs come from and how violent are they? This chapter begins with the story of a Salvadoran ex-member of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) in order to better understand how this gang and others emerged in the streets of East Los Angeles and evolved to become loosely-networked “franchises” with thousands of members in several countries. In the 1990s the Los Angeles Police Department deported tens thousands of Central American youth, among whom were many members of the MS-13 and the M-18 who colonized the local street gangs already existing in Central America. The transnational gangs are compared to a franchise in order to emphasize their fluidity and their highly local dynamics along with their adoption of internationally recognized symbols, vocabulary, and protocols. The chapter also examines the connection between gang membership and homicide rates in the “Northern Triangle” of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

This chapter examines Central American evangelical churches and how they emerged in the region. The chapter emphasizes the fact that Central American evangelicals see themselves as religious “outsiders” even though their numbers have grown considerably in recent years. According to the most recent polling data, nearly a third of Central Americans now self-identify as Protestant and most of these individuals belong to evangelical or Pentecostal congregations. The chapter also examines the different streams of evangelical Christianity in the region, paying particular attention to what the author calls “barrio evangelicalism”—the small, local, Pentecostalized congregations that abound in the poor and working-class neighborhoods (barrios). These congregations emphasize strict personal piety, evangelization, and physical and psychological healing.

This chapter examines Catholic and evangelical gang intervention and prevention programs in order to understand the religious and nonreligious motives behind gang ministry as well as the very different approaches to ministry taken by Catholics when compared with evangelicals. Whereas Catholic gang interventionists promote community development and social and political change, evangelical gang ministry workers tend to view the gang problem as a “spiritual problem” best addressed by the church. Although some of the reasons for these differences probably have more to do with differences in levels of education, evangelical pastors and promoters tend to view themselves as “good Samaritans” seeking to help individual gang members while Catholic priests and ministry workers tend to view themselves as “Crusaders” against systemic injustice. The chapter also explores possible explanations for why evangelical growth remains strong in the region—even among males, despite its lifestyle expectations.

Does evangelical religion provide a hopeful solution to Central America’s struggle with gang violence? Or, is it merely a distraction from the real work of structural reform and economic justice. After reviewing the findings of prior chapters, the author argues that while religious conversions do offer useful resources for individual gang members seeking to leave the gang and rebuild an identity and a stable lifestyle, evangelical religion will not solve Central America’s problem with gang violence. In fact, some of the ex-gang members interviewed grew up in evangelical households prior to joining the gang. Instead, a multipronged approach is necessary that involves removing or reducing the social sources of shame such as poverty and family-disrupting migration, as well as reducing opportunities for money making through the drug trade by ending the self-defeating war on drugs.

Pediatric heart surgery missions define an emergent, high-tech form of medical humanitarianism characterized by their focus not on populations in crisis (Redfield 2013), but on broken body parts—in this case, damaged pediatric hearts. Comprised of specialists from the world’s most elite medical centers, mission teams make brief visits to poor countries to perform highly-specialized and otherwise prohibitively expensive surgical procedures on children with few alternatives for survival. A team’s success is measured in terms of patient volume, surgical complexity, and the probability of the patient being well enough to leave the hospital within 30 days. This chapter explores the forms of bioprecarity that both precede and follow mission visits and that inadvertently affect the very patients whose surgeries are publicly billed as ‘successes’. That is, as much as surgical missions aim to repair pediatric bodies in distress, they, too, produce new anxieties, uncertainties, and biological vulnerabilities for patients and their families that are often visible only long after missions depart from the host country. These findings emerged from 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Honduras, an established destination for medical and surgical missions, where I carried out observations and interviews in public hospitals before, during, and after visits by pediatric heart surgery missions as well as in the homes of surgical patients.

This chapter asks the question of whether the dilemmas that families face, as great as they are, continue to be relevant in the context of other crises, from epidemics to natural disasters, to the long-term aftermath of wars. It begins with families in Botswana, where the AIDS pandemic has led to a reduction in life expectancy measured in decades. Next, it explores the lives of families in Honduras, two years after massive mudslides displaced more than a million people. Then, families in Vietnam were interviewed a quarter-century after a war that led to several million deaths. Even in the midst of these tragedies and their aftermaths, there are glimpses of hope—programs that are truly making a difference in the lives of children, not just for a moment, but for a generation. It ends by describing these programs and the chance they provide for profound change.

This chapter discusses human migration and multiethnicity in Copan, a Maya archaeological site in modern Honduras. A broad skeletal sample from the site has been studied through basic osteology, mortuary archaeology, and archaeochemistry (stable isotope analysis). The combined results show that the ancient city had a significant number of immigrants from all over the Maya Area. There was no sex or age related distinction, nor socioeconomic exclusivity, among these immigrants. In such a multiethnic city, biocultural body modifications, like dental decorations and intentional head shaping, were indicative of their social identities, especially “Mayahood.” The dynamic changes of these biocultural attributes at spatial and chronological scales are evidence of shifting social identities at the southeastern borderland of the Maya Area.

As a threat to life and liberty, wars and political upheavals have served to precipitate the flight of populations since biblical times (Marrus, 1985; Zolberg et al., 1989; UNHCR, 2000). Historically, the basic mechanism of flight, sometimes across national boundaries, and with no surety of safety or asylum in the new land, has operated as a device for the carriage of infectious diseases from one geographical location to another. In Chapter 2, for example, we encountered numerous instances of wartime fugitives who spread bubonic plague, typhus fever, and other war pestilences to their local ‘host’ populations. At the same time, however, fleeing populations may be forced to enter epidemiological environments to which they are unacclimatized, with the attendant risk of exposure to diseases for which they have little or no acquired immunity. The intensive mixing of the populations in refugee camps or other makeshift forms of shelter, often with poor levels of hygiene, with little or no medical provision, and under conditions of stress and malnutrition, further add to the disease risks of displacement (Prothero, 1994; Kalipeni and Oppong, 1998; UNHCR, 2000). The epidemiological dimensions of wartime population displacement—variously manifesting in the movements of refugees, evacuees, and other persons who abandon their homes as a consequence of conflict—form the theme of the present chapter. We begin, in Section 5.2, with a brief overview of international developments in the recognition and management of war-displaced populations, the legal meaning which attaches to such classifications as refugee and internally displaced person (IDP), and theoretical frameworks that have been developed for the study of such groups. International refugees, along with certain other categories of displaced person, have fallen within the mandate of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) since its inception in January 1951. Drawing on this source, Section 5.3 examines global trends in refugees and other UNHCR-recognized populations of concern during the latter half of the twentieth century, while Section 5.4 reviews epidemiological aspects of the associated population movements. The remainder of the chapter follows a regional-thematic structure.

Why did Spanish Europeans decide not to settle the mainland, coast, and cayes that are now Belize? How did Spaniards or other seafaring Europeans view Belize's coast, and did this information find its way to early maps? How was the land that became Belize known to the early conquerors? In this chapter, possible Franciscan travel through Belize is discussed, as is the important role of trade and coastal travel in the Maya world just prior to the Conquest, with much of the information based on archaeological data. An attempt is made to contextualize Belize in terms of the conquests of Yucatan and Central America.

This chapter discusses the so-called Ch'orti' area, its people, culture and language. Ch'orti' culture and language existed in what is today eastern Guatemala, western Honduras, and northwestern El Salvador at the time of the Spanish-Mexican invasion. This chapter analyzes the impact of the Spanish invasion and colonization on the indigenous polities in the region and provides a map showing the location of the Ch'orti' area.

This chapter examines the environmental record of human population and migration in the Copan Valley, Honduras, which is the most prominent archaeological site in the region defined in this book as the Ch'orti' area. It analyzes settlement patterns and material culture and explores how data from two sediment cores extracted from under bodies of water in the Copan Valley can contribute to debates on human population in this area. The findings suggest that Maya may have arrived in the valley a couple of hundred years prior to the arrival of K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo'.

This chapter examines the ethnographic analogy and the archaeological evidence of Maya identity at the Copan Valley archaeological site in Honduras. It analyzes the continuity and force of the Maya designation for ancient Copan by considering the contributions of specific archaeologists during the recent, ongoing phase of research there. It explores the ways in which past, recent, and ongoing archaeological work at Copan does, and inevitably will, inform identity politics in Honduras.

In this chapter I claim that climate change poses important questions of global justice, both about mitigating the change that is now under way and about adapting to its consequences. I argue for a mixed policy of mitigation and adaptation, and defend one particular approach to mitigation. I also claim that those of us who are rich by global standards and benefit from excess emissions have strenuous duties in our roles as citizens, consumers, producers, and so on, to reduce our emissions and to finance adaptation. When I began my research on global climate change in the mid-1980s, it was commonly said that there were three possible responses: prevention, mitigation, and adaptation. Even then we were committed to a substantial climate change, although this was not widely known. This realization began to dawn on many people on June 23, 1988, a sweltering day in Washington, D.C., in the middle of a severe national drought, when climate modeler James Hansen testified before a U.S. Senate committee that it was 99 percent probable that global warming had begun. Hansen’s testimony was front-page news in the New York Times, and was extensively covered in other media as well. Whether or not Hanson was right, his testimony made clear that we were entering a new world, what Schneider (1989) called “the greenhouse century.” Once it became clear that prevention was no longer possible, mitigation quickly moved to center stage. One week after Hansen’s testimony, an international conference in Toronto, convened by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), called for a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions by 2005. In November, the World Congress on Climate and Development, meeting in Hamburg, called for a 30 percent reduction by 2000. Later that same year, acting on a proposal by the United States, the WMO and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in order to assess the relevant scientific information and to formulate response strategies.